![]() The figures are screenshots from the 2016 movie “ Fantastic beasts and where to find them” (the adult niffler on the left) and from the 2018 movie “ Fantastic beasts: The crimes of Grindelwald” (the baby niffler on the right). Despite they can destroy houses, they are possibly the cutest fantastic beasts. Nifflers are relatively harmless magical animals native to Britain, they resemble a platypus and are attracted to shiny things. Investigating these relationships may thus provide useful information about the evolutionary forces that shaped magical biological diversity and, ultimately, about adaptation. ![]() The Ministry of Magic classified these beasts based on their perceived level of danger, from 1 to 5: “boring,” ‘harmless “competent wizard should cope,” “dangerous,” and “impossible to train or domesticate.” After reading the book-and notwithstanding the details on the biology and behavior of each animal ( Figure 1)-some crucial questions stuck in my head: what drives the distribution of these fantastic beasts, and the geographical variation in their level of danger? To put it in other words, why do beasts live where they live, especially the most dangerous ones? The reader will agree this is a fundamental ecological question! The distribution of animals and their phenotypes can be influenced by a variety of ecological factors such as food or climate, among others. In 1927, the magizoologist Newt Scamander published a seminal book where he described, with a fair amount of details, all the known magical animals of the world.
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